> Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see.
FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality.
"quality" here meaning accuracy of the targeting, not a comment on the content.
Nor mine. My complaints are about what I see. I don't want an overload of ads, and especially not irrelevant ads. I don't want suggested content/topics. I don't want suggested follows. I just want to see tweets from the people I chose to follow. Same with Instagram.
But I think the reason they push against this is that is risks people losing interest as the sort of people I follow aren't strong/consistent content creators. They're just people I know personally and want to stay in touch with. Twitter wants to be a firehose of stuff that fires me up. Instagram wants to be endless TV channels of constant content. Whereas I like being able to get up to date on everything my friends have posted, and then go back to what I was doing.
Oh come now. I constantly hear this concern from my friends (almost exclusively left-of-center).
And they aren't totally wrong? I have a qanon-er in my family; she's carefully curated her media sources to guarantee a pure, steady stream of nutjob garbage. The thing is, censoring twitter/facebook/youtube makes no difference - these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look. At least on youtube there's a chance the algorithm will show some non-bullshit.
I don't know what "the answer" to any of this is, but I suspect we all need to be a bit more tolerant of online stupidity.
Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame. It's incredibly easy to like/dislike/hide-like-this content. My feeds are fantastic. I suspect the people complaining about their feeds actually like garbage and even more so like to complain.
Old joke: "If you owe the bank $1M it's your problem, if you owe the bank $1B it's theirs". New joke: "If a few citizens become radicalized/crazy in ways that threaten the very functioning of your society it's their problem ... "
> Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame. It's incredibly easy to like/dislike/hide-like-this content. My feeds are fantastic. I suspect the people complaining about their feeds actually like garbage and even more so like to complain.
I'd imagine most people have reasonable assumption than YT will only show you more stuff that you like (as in press the like button), not that any engagement, even downvotes, will continue to put more shit into your stream.
Ever wondered why YTbers ask for comments and don't shy from saying "if you didn't like it, downvote and tell me in the comments"? That still drives engagement and that is all to algorithm.
Once you get it, it's easy to keep the shit you don't want in the stream, but not everyone is well versed in algorithmical ways so it's not that hard to get into algorithmics hole
> these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look
This is likely true. Most of the discussion around "the algorithm" is mainly centered around whether there's something about the way the major online sharing channels are selecting what to present that acts as a funnel towards QAnon and other radical theories, not whether people already dedicated to finding such information can find it.
Precisely. If I had to hazard a guess, I think their algorithm is hyper-optimizing for linkages, and when linkages are broad but tenuous, it hyper-optimizes for the ones with only the slightest dominance.
Hypothetically: all sorts of people are interested in the history of World War II... it's a big war, it defined politics for over half a century, and it's taught every year in the history classes of at least a hundred nations. So you're looking at a topic with hundreds of "also likes" connections but no strong winner.
Perhaps there is a 0.000001% chance that if you watch a WWII video, your next video will be one on modern Nazism (including recruitment videos). I wonder if YouTube's algorithm boosts that small fluctuation in a sea of noise into a single recommendation result (or even grabs the top 5, but the signal is so noisy that this one still shows up in that top 5)?
> Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame.
Yes and no. Youtube radicalisation / algorithmic extremism is a thing, because the engagement-maximising algorithm has a strong bias for rabbit-holes, kooks, con-artists and incendiary nonsense. The "funnel towards QAnon" that the sibling comment mentioned.
Unless you lean hard against it - which first requires awareness of the problem and the skills or knowledge to spot it - it will be in your feed. "you are to blame" is to an extent blaming the victims.
It took until 2021 for people to figure out that quote-tweeting politician hot takes to dunk on them, actually helped politicians' reach because Twitter counted it as engagement.
An increasing number, but still very low. And awareness in itself won't solve the issue entirely. This is why the "you are to blame" sentiment is to an extent blaming the victims.
I think there's some nuance here though, where people do make a distinction between opposing views and harmful content. (likely not everyone, but still)
What I mean is, I don't care if someone reads a politician I hate. I care if they read a politician who enables the next pizzagate or worse. Or if they read state sponsored misinformation while thinking it's genuine opinions. And yeah, I do acknowledge there's some overlapping grey area.
> The main takeaway is that you care what other people read, not about what people are making you read.
As do I, and you. I was pretty happy when all of those ISIS accounts that were spewing violence and hate got shut down. I'm sure you have your boundaries on what you'd want society to allow and restrict on public mediums.
The specific details of what those boundaries are will depend on your personal notion of what constitutes communication which can be considered abusive. As it will for any other person.
Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.
I guarantee you if we have a back and forth discussion we will discover where your boundaries lie across the myriad issues where people typically want to control public discourse.
Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that.
If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream.
> Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.
3/4 of what you mentioned is illegal in most places in the first place so it isn't point of contention.
And that isn't really a problem. Site deciding this or that political view is now bad is.
You try to put removing the illegal/disturbing content in same category as worldview manipulation. The first is way more black and white than the second and should not be considered together, even if similar systems are used for them.
The distinctions you're bringing up seem kind of perfunctory to me.
The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter.
And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across broader domains.
What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit.
If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.
I guess I should have been more explicit in the first response - but what I'm suggesting is that this conversation is better had in less absolutist terms than what you proposed. There was the implication that the other person somehow inherently wanted to control communication in a qualitatively different way than you (or I did).
That's not to go down the path of sophistry - but just to suggest to orient the conversation around where the boundaries should be placed in practical terms, and discuss where the differences in boundaries lie and on an issue by issue basis evaluate that, rather than absolutist/ideological terms.
"You want to control speech (and I don't)" doesn't really lead anywhere in terms of discourse. It's a dead end.
> (parent) Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that.
> What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit. If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.
The parent commenter was simply saying that the abhorrent examples you provided were not a point of contention, and not relevant to a conversation about free speech. They weren't attempting to put the word of the law onto a pedestal as you seem to suggest, they were simply pointing out that the things you mentioned are universally considered bad all around the planet, whereas freedom of speech is not.
The situation you've outlined in which one political party successfully silences their opponents through legal means is exactly why a "Site deciding this or that political view is now bad" is so dangerous.
Copyright violations are a violations against a legal abstraction. Deepfakes are a new form of deception (I didn't imply sexual deepfakes). I used the language of "minors" to explicitly reference those gray legal areas around boundaries and teens sexting each other (which has landed those children in legal quagmires). None of those examples are "abhorrent" as much as "complicated".
> "Site deciding this or that political view is now bad" is so dangerous.
I'll admit again: I was quite happy when accounts supporting and promoting ISIS were banned from various social networks. I was more active on social media then (less so now), and it made me feel very uncomfortable to be on the same platform being leveraged to the ends of those radicals. They were just using it so _gleefully_.
I don't know if I'll be accused of wanting to control what people read, because that's what that is. But I think that falls into the political views most of us agree we don't mind if a social network purges. Violent revolutionary religious politics. It's somewhat natural that they'd have a business interest in maybe not hosting that stuff.
So is violent revolutionary religious politics the boundary? Companies should be free to police those political accounts, but less free to police others? Is it a sliding scale or a hard boundary? Who determines the degree of violence? Is implied violence included? If so how do we determine implied violence?
I'm not attempting to answer those questions. I'm saying those are the questions that a statement to the effect of "You want to control speech (and I don't)" is trying to avoid.
That said, those questions are hard, and maybe arguing about them and answering them actually requires a long time and a lot of consideration and doesn't fit neatly into a hacker news thread.
> Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.
> None of those examples are "abhorrent" as much as "complicated".
Uhh, if you say so. They are your words after all, not mine.
> So is violent revolutionary religious politics the boundary?
I think the parent commenter's point was that you were both pretty much on the same page as far as being fine with illegal content being moderated, but the one thing they absolutely were not okay with is when powerful political entities (read: social networks) censor their political opponents in order to consolidate power for their own party.
> Uhh, if you say so. They are your words after all, not mine
Was there a particular reason you ignored the elaboration and re-quoted the original comment? And if there is something you want to express about it please do. This is kind of a meaningless retort.
> I think the parent commenter's point was that you were both pretty much on the same page as far as being fine with illegal content
I don't remember a due process being followed for most of those ISIS accounts being banned. I don't remember the social networks restricting their bans to those people that had been convicted of illegal communications.
And yet I supported that move. I understood that the network would not want that sort of crap on its airwaves, and that might see a business interest in not having its platform associated with that movement, and want to eliminate the ability of that movement to use their platforms to further their aims.
As much as one might want to reach for "illegality" is some clearcut dividing line, that simply doesn't apply here. Most of us supported accounts getting banned with no due process, no oversight, or anything - when it was violent revolutionary religious politics that we disagreed with.
>I don't remember a due process being followed for most of those ISIS accounts being banned. I don't remember the social networks restricting their bans to those people that had been convicted of illegal communications.
> And yet I supported that move. I understood that the network would not want that sort of crap on its airwaves, and that might see a business interest in not having its platform associated with that movement, and want to eliminate the ability of that movement to use their platforms to further their aims.
Again, you're missing the point, blocking proven terrorists is not the same as the politic you don't like.
You're trying to excuse blocking benign stuff by desperately trying to group them with stuff most people would agree is probably borderline illegal and harmful
Yes there is a reason I used your original comment, it was an attempt to hold you accountable for your words after you backtracked. The actions you mentioned in your original remark was more along the lines of abhorrent than questionable and I wanted to make that clear.
> The distinctions you're bringing up seem kind of perfunctory to me.
If you don't see distinction between posting pedophilia/beheadings and different political views that's entirely you problem.
"We don't allow what law doesn't allow, and moderate what is considering explicit by default, but you can opt out of that" I think is entirely fine line for platform to stand on. Anything above that is them fucking around with public opinion for their benefits.
>The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter.
> And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across broader domains.
Government is supposed to work toward interest of its people, not corporations, that's the difference here. And, well, the government is only entity that can tell corporation to behave. You can just not vote in the wankers to the office too.
Government (in first world countries) will only tell you to stop once you actually start to incite violence, not when you post some wrongthink on social media (except UK I guess...).
Are there governments worse than corporations ? Sure, but corpos can just not participate in their market. They will, for the money, and that's all there is to say about corporate goals.
> What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit.
Sure, slavery was legal at some point. Doesn't really matter. That's not the point.
The point here that you are desperately trying to miss is that corporation should not have power to manipulate public opinion at will, because only target for corporation is to earn more money
And you can tell government to change the laws, that's how we got slavery banned, women getting rights to vote and minorities being not repressed. Can't do that to corporation. Of course you need to want government act in benefit of its people which US have hard time doing (the stuff your "lobbyists" are doing would get them arrested in EU...) but even that skewed system is still better than Zuck or Elon or other clown deciding what people should see or not see.
The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it. Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'.
Most people do not like casually being exposed to such content, and so any sort of soft policy against it results in users self-selecting out of the social ecosystem. It's no longer just your decision, but one that affects the entire platform. And soon the entire platform becomes dedicated to that disturbing content because everyone else has left.
You could go to Parler or Gab or whatever site right now to see the results of your experiment in action and see why user self-moderation leads to the destruction of the site. This is why users offload that mental stress to the owners of the site who then hire people to manually filter the cruft themselves (often for the worse of the people doing said filtering, but that's a whole 'nother thing).
> The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it.
If you actually read my comment properly you'd notice that I explicitly said there should be a default ban list blocking that
> Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'.
That's orthogonal problem; If you wanted to get rid of that entirely you'd have to pre-screen every content and that's just not feasible, nor any of the media does it aside from some automated filters on keywords.
Nor it is actual problem if you don't subscribe to people that post that; random nobody deciding to post that won't be featured in any feeds anyway because of how algorithms work so there is very little chance it will land on accident in someone's feed.
Of course someone could play the long con and get popular only to start publishing disturbing stuff, but none of current systems stop that and I'm not sure you even could.
Your comment goes against what you originally said then, which is that you 'don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office' to decide that. You're making a concession that you do want them to decide SOME content that is by default blocked, which then this becomes a matter of degrees. Some people would disagree with your stance and think that it still violates free speech, hence Parler/Gab etc. Plenty of disturbing content is not illegal, which is where the gray area of moderation comes into play.
Even if you don't subscribe to people that post that, there's still the issue of network effects. They subscribe to someone that subscribes to someone that subscribes to someone that posts a beheading video that gains popularity, and so the algorithm prioritizes that traffic because it's within your graph. You can easily notice these effects just on Twitter if you pay attention closely to what it decides to show you.
You can credit the printing press and increase in accessible information to the literate classes with the enlightenment, broader literacy, modern banking and a whole lot of other good things but the backdrop of all these developments was 100-300yr (depending on how you count) of religious and succession wars as some power was taken from the catholic church and the rulers that were closest to it and redistributed to a broader set of local rulers.
It was definitely a step forward for humanity but it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows.
If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious.
I've seen them asking for private forums to stop giving such folk a platform, because an organization can choose to do what it will with its private property.
But public forums? No, I can't say I have. In fact, I remember witnessing a President giving a large speech in a public forum that was followed by a riot at the Capitol (whether said speech was causal to the riot is still a matter for the courts). Nobody challenged his right to give the speech until the question of whether it was "incitement to riot" came up, and that challenge is unrelated.
Range doesn't make something a public forum. Generally, control of the space by the public (or their delegates) does.
A letter to the editor of the New York Times has the potential to be seen by 343,000 households (a number down from 1.3 million). This never made the New York Times' letters page a public forum.
Twitter, for example, was at least previously accountable to shareholders. Now, it's very much a private forum.
Twitter is competition to Facebook, Facebook to Twitter, and as we're observing thanks to Twitter coming under new management, Mastodon is competition to Twitter also.
> If you stifle voices on that platform majority of the country won't hear them
This is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but doesn't imply either a legal or moral responsibility on Twitter's part. Freedom of the press has never meant one is obliged to let others use one's press; in fact, it means the opposite.
If people want a channel more unbiased than Twitter [1], they should build it. The Musk purchase has shown how fragile the bird really is when the users lose confidence in it.
You note that them not technically being public is a problem. I think you raise an interesting question: what would a technically public forum look like and who would build it? If the government built it, do we imagine it would run the Post story, or would those in charge of it squelch it because the story is harmful to the active regime? It is, perhaps, best for the government to be out of the business of editorial work; leave that to the press.
(... and if one wants a government-subsidized communication channel that isn't edited by someone else: that's the Internet and we already have it. Then one's goal to combat Twitter becomes building a service as easy-to-use as Twitter that everyone can use; make the press itself as free as possible. I recommend supporting the Mastodon project if that's one's goal. Or put effort into making one of the many, many blogging software packages of the world ever more turnkey. The way to maximize freedom of the press is to maximize presses, not constrain how the freedom can be used).
[1] long experience suggests to me what you actually get when you try this experiment is a channel with different biases, but by all means.
It's not irony. The ability to say something doesn't imply anyone is obligated to either listen or agree.
Downvotes imply a desire to quiet a signal (or at least, a belief the signal is uninteresting and should show up below other signals) and the site is designed to enhance interesting signals and suppress uninteresting ones.
Everything here is doing exactly what it says on the tin. The weird notion is that one should be able to just walk into a space like this, say whatever, and get it treated with the same reverence as any other statement.
There are other places on the internet that act like that, and they are not this place.
The parent comment implied that a particular political faction engages in silencing and perhaps its extremer form: cancellations. The reaction to the statement is to soft-silence that remark.
This means it hit a nerve, presumably for the exact demographic mentioned, whom then proceeded with (mild) censorship. That's perfect irony.
Just like it's irony when Singapore authorities banned any newspapers stating that the authorities are authoritarian. That's irony by its very definition.
I'm just saying it's irony. I don't care if one agrees with the statement or not, or what is allowed/popular to say on HN. I'm well aware this is a California forum. I now expect downvotes to confirm that it is.
> If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious.
This doesn’t seem like a low-signal comment: it’s factually true and relevant to the context.
Rather, people are falsely marking it as low signal because they don’t like it and want to manipulate the discussion by hiding things they don’t like.
Which is classic censorship — and I think highlights a deeply anti-intellectual trend in this community.
People sometimes down-signal a comment because it's not the type of comment they want to see on HN for reasons other than factual content.
Prognosticating the zeitgeist is a fraught enterprise, but in this case, I'd guess tone twanged a lot of nerves. The first two sentences of comment guidance [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html] are "Be kind. Don't be snarky." There's a vast Internet that lacks a rule like that and HN tries to do something other than be that.
I think whether "be kind" is at odds with, or a criteria of, an intellectual discourse is left as an exercise for (possibly literally, in this case) the reader.
One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience.
If failure to do so gets one's comment "censored" out of an intellectual discourse, perhaps that is a feature not a bug.
When I was younger, I used to believe "The pursuit of truth is so important that even truth coarsely spoken should not be quieted." As I've gotten older, I've come to observe that more often than not, people conflate coarse speaking with truth when the two are more likely to be divorced from each other than walking hand-in-hand. And the ability to smooth a harsh truth is a virtue... If for no other reason than most people read for entertainment, not truth-seeking, so the important facts are likelier to land in their minds and germinate if they aren't coated in a protein shell of personal attack language.
But again, prognosticating downvotes is a fraught enterprise (and also recommended against by the guidelines, so I shall say no more on the topic).
I understand that the reason people use the veneer of propriety to justify censorship is so they can do as you’ve done here: give a long self-righteous screed about how they’re upholding the good of the community when engaging in anti-intellectual censorship.
> One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience
This is just an imagining — people say this when they’re upset that facts challenge dearly held delusions, eg the media is unbiased and informs you about the world, and then engage in ex post facto attacks on the form of your message to silence you and remove that cognitive annoyance. The anger is not at the phrasing, but in having their world view challenged at all.
I think you brought up that imagining because you need to reassure yourself that you’re calmly rational as a reader — and not lashing out with censorship due to emotions. That you’re not actually anti-intellectual, you just happen to be copying their mannerism — for good!
We’ve heard these arguments for millennia: can you name a historic (prior to 1900) example where those censoring in the name of decorum led to positive outcomes?
Large US news companies have their staff largely in areas like California, New York, etc. because US media conglomerates are concentrated in those areas.
Eg, WarnerMedia who is the parent company of CNN — a news agency that’s undergone substantial cuts under a new CEO due to its bias.
My experience of WarnerMedia is that they have politics among their staff reflective of the cities they’re in, but which may not reflect the overall demographics of the US. Eg, their Seattle office had politics at place in Seattle — but those are far left of most US politics. That bias impacts the choices made about content.
This matches other peoples experience and apparent business decisions — eg, the other poster referring to this same bias and CNN experiencing a sharp drop in ratings followed by corporate restructuring under a new CEO.
expand on how this in any way shows that a "...chorus of coastal media types..." (again, still waiting for a definition of this) are somehow factually "...asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum"
Sorry — I didn’t realize you were being disingenuous.
I don’t believe you’re sincerely unaware of the calls to censor misinformation in media; and we literally just explained which media companies based in politically biased bubbles we were discussing.
im trying to understand what is being argued here.
the person i responded to said it was a fact that "a chorus of coastal media types" are "asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum"
the comment said this was a fact. and i still don't think thats a fact.
now in this comment you say they're sending "calls to censor misinformation in media"--then sure. are you implying that journalists should be forced to report misinformation? and if they choose _not_ to report misinformation, they're censoring?
“Oh, those calls I already knew about, but pretended not to?”
This is why I think you’re being disingenuous.
Your comment about misinformation ignores that what they call “misinformation” is merely information they don’t like — eg, when they censored the Hunter Biden story during an election, while calling for Republicans and news outlets (eg, NY Post) who told the truth to be deplatformed.
Your vapid replies pretending not to recognize that as censorship are as in poor faith as saying that North Korea can’t be an oppressive autocracy because “democratic republic” is in the name.
We should be very skeptical of claims of "censorship" and "deplatforming" from a corporation that literally has its own press and can manufacture its own platform.
Twitter chose to block the Post's story as factually incorrect because they were skeptical of it. That's their choice, much as the Post can choose not to trust a source. Twitter were wrong, but media outlets are sometimes wrong (for example, https://nypost.com/tag/correction/).
The Post is right to criticize Twitter's error, but any claims that Twitter lacked the right to make that call is, well, chipping at the rights the Post itself enjoys of control over its own pages. The Post can't force Twitter to run their stories any more than anyone should have the right to force the Post itself to quash the laptop story; both editorial authorities stem from the same freedom of the press.
Yes — that’s correct: Twitter censored a politically hot story they didn’t like during an election, silencing discussion of the Bidens’ illicit foreign dealings not only from the NY Post, but among all their users.
That’s my point: censorship invariably is these “mistakes” of censoring truth you dislike rather than any noble purpose. Indeed, the whole pretense of noble purpose is precisely so you can make these ignoble “mistakes” with a clear conscience — you were trying to protect the community! …why is everyone complaining the outcome was censoring your political rivals during an election?
You ignored me in the other thread:
People have been making these same arguments in favor of censorship for millennia; can you give a historic example (pre-1900) where people censoring were on the right side of history?
> can you give a historic example (pre-1900) where people censoring were on the right side of history?
I don't know why you're constraining the time frame to pre-1900, but sure.
From 1899 prior, almost every time a newspaper decided not to report something that they believed was false. Because by and large, newspapers do a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff and reporting stories that at least seem to be true. What they don't do is report, without editorial insight, everything they could. They don't publish every letter to the editor, they don't run every story a reporter chases, and they never have. Filtering is part of their job. We remember the errors in filtering (especially if it's a good newspaper because they will report a retraction or correction) but there isn't too terribly much evidence in black and white of the dozens of decisions editors make to not amplify the noise. Obviously, since it didn't end up in a paper.
There are people in the world who believe the Earth is flat. Nobody is under any obligation to spread that belief. I'm not saying Twitter should start censoring discussion of flat Earth, but it's up to them if they choose to.
I guess the result is it wouldn't be a very welcoming channel for discussion of flat Earth topics. Nothing really lost there, I guess someone will have to set up a forum for it.
But Twitter isn’t a newspaper: they’re an aggregation and communication service who chose to censor what other people were allowed to communicate in a way that benefitted them politically — and who is not in the process of expressing regular editorial control of publication. (Unless you’re claiming that it’s not user content…?)
I also wouldn’t be holding up 1880-1900 journalism as an example of accuracy — you’re describing the period of salacious Jack the Ripper stories. Is that your best example of censorship working out positively — that tabloid era in journalism?
I’m asking you where this has led to positive things; not contesting the rights of Twitter.
But actually, I think there is something lost when Twitter no longer hosts flat Earth debates: the ability to convincingly explain why the Earth isn’t flat requires practice and refinement; and to know that the Earth isn’t flat requires we allow the idea to be challenged.
You don’t seem able to think of a case that censors showed a clear benefit to society — but there’s several in the past few years where they haven’t:
- Hunter Biden story may as well have been election interference
- somehow, deaths are spiking beyond COVID — quite possibly as a result of COVID policies; we never had a genuine debate over what to do
- similarly, multiple countries have pulled COVID vaccines for kids due to the risk of myocarditis… which has been known all along, but was censored from discussion
I was hoping to see a convincing historic example, cut free from modern politics so I could assess it fairly — but there don’t seem to be any examples where censorship generated positives to offset the huge negatives I see happening at present.
> You don’t seem able to think of a case that censors showed a clear benefit to society — but there’s several in the past few years where they haven’t:
Not under the rules you specified, no. I'm not a scholar of newspaper history.
After 1900, I can invoke the history of the FCC. By regulating access to the finite resource of bandwidth, they created an interesting circumstance: what you could say on television was regulated because your license could be revoked for failure to uphold a standard that protected the American living room. And for a long, long time: it worked! It worked quite well. There was a broad variety of television and radio available, it was broadly inoffensive, It generally reported the truth and / or was entertaining, and it had a certain national cohesion promotion effect that we've utterly lost in this era of unregulated mass communication. Speaking of, those regulations began to be undermined in the Reagan era, which is when Saturday morning cartoons became feature length commercials for toys. It's hard for me to claim that's an improvement over the previous regulations.
Could you get everything? Not from television. And that was fine. If somebody wanted to broadcast a message, they either needed a sympathetic ear in the media or they needed to own a station.
And that's the key thing, because when you use the term censorship, you're not talking about censorship. You've been consistently talking about who has control over broadcast. You've been consistently calling a private company's decision to not rebroadcast a signal sent to them "censorship" as if we should have any right to the resources of a private corporation. If anything, Twitter looks like a broadcast channel sitting on a non-finite resource. Since the resource is not finite, the government lacks the interest in regulating who uses it that it had for airwaves, which is fine. But those who demand some sort of fairness in how it chooses what it retransmits are asking for a massive prior restraint on its freedom to do with its service what it will that has no precedent. And the precedent it sets opens a huge can of worms.
If some government authority can mandate Twitter has to discuss flat earth, can they also mandate it has to give a platform to Nazis? That'll be incompatible with the law of several countries, for starters. It's also broadly incompatible with the American tradition of the press. You can't force NBC to platform Nazis. You can't force the New York times to give Nazis column inches. What the (US) government is restrained from doing is shutting down the Nazi newspaper and preventing the Nazi candidate from applying to the ballot using the same rules that every candidate does. Nowhere does the law require us to allow them to use our resources to promote their message. Not even a billboard operator is required to do business with them, no matter how green their money is... The law just prevents the government from restraining them from setting up their own billboard under the general rules of billboards.
Twitter belongs to Twitter and none of us have the right to force it to retransmit any damn thing we say. Their pipes, their storage, their servers, their rules. We should host a blog if we don't like it.
if an organization chooses not to use its voice to spread misinformation, thats not censorship.
is it censorship when my weather app _chooses_ not to say it’s snowing when it’s 103 out?
that’s absurd.
one of the links posted above said some americans believe that all sides should be reported equally. again that’s
stupid. not just silly, it’s stupid. “all” sides? these muppets believe “all” sides deserve equal weight, always?
People used to, after midnight bury a toads leg under an oak tree on the third full moon believing it would cure cancer.
are people now arguing that medical journals should be required to include this next to all cancer research? that it should be covered equally with the same weight? that’s stupid.
is it censorship if a journal doesn’t include woo crazy nonsense? no, it’s an editorial choice.
you can attack me and call my posts vapid all you like, but i was asking for more clarification from vague posts making extraordinary vague claims about some vague “chorus of coastal media types”
You asked explicitly what the other person was implying. If you ask that and then say that you weren't asking about any subtext, then one of us has some misunderstanding about the meaning of these words—and that person is not me.
(This comment by me, for example, is definitely imbued with subtext.)
Separately, put some effort into your attempts to have a discussion, please. I.e., beyond the bare minimum that it takes to type one or two sentences and press "reply" without giving it much more thought.
Yes. The entire question is predicated on there being a subtext. I answered that: assume the words they wrote were what they meant. Believing that "[what] they meant" was something besides that or that there was something else that "they were implying" is to believe that there was a subtext by definition.
neither of these at all show that a "...chorus of coastal media types..." (still waiting for an honest definition of this) are "...asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum."
You asked for the definition of "coastal media" type and got one. You need your own definition of "chorus" or whether it applies in a given context.
I'm sorry you don't think the definition is "honest" -- whatever can that possibly mean? It's the definition. You may not like the word, but even words you don't like have definitions. Even dishonest slurs have a meaning, they are not random sounds, even if you don't like the meaning.
FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality.
"quality" here meaning accuracy of the targeting, not a comment on the content.